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Minutes From Discussion About Local Chapters

From the SIGCHI Executive Committee Meeting held January 15, 2005 in Portland, OR

Discussion on Local ChaptersACM wants to facilitate stronger connections with members
of local chapters and to build activities and connections among them that enrich
them in some way. Local chapters are viewed as a valuable but mostly untapped
resource for growing membership and evolving future leadership in specific SIGs
as well as the broader organization. For example, many SIGCHI members are
members of local chapters, but many members of local chapters are not SIGCHI
members. Also, knowledge of user locale, experiences, and desires for content
would enable the ACM to create a more tailored user experience on the ACM portal
and digital library through cross-marketing. The discussion focused on
understanding how to achieve this stronger connection. Note that this issue is
not confined only to SIGCHI, it is something that the ACM is addressing at an
organizational level. However, since SIGCHI has one of the largest local chapter
memberships, we discussed relations with our local chapters to offer broader
recommendations proactively.

A Study on the Current State of RelationsOnly SIGCHI and SIGGRAPH have significant local chapter
membership. For example, SIGCHI has 60-70 chapters spread across 39 countries
and 6 continents. Compared to about 5000 SIGCHI members, there about 10,000
chapter members!

How can ACM and SIGCHI reach chapter members and make it a
fair exchange between utility for the member and cost (monetary, email and
postal addresses, other personal information, etc.). What is it that chapter
members want?

Apala Lahiri Chavan, Vice President for Chapters, conducted
surveys and follow up interviews with a sample of our local chapters to
understand the current state of relations and to seed ideas for how to improve
those relations. She contacted 15 chapters and 7 chapters responded. Among many
questions, Apala asked about the goals of the chapter, what types of activities
they conduct (meetings, panels, lab walkthroughs, etc.), what do they perceive
as the benefits of being affiliated with ACM, what benefits do they utilize the
most, and how could SIGCHI or the ACM develop a stronger relationship with them.

Summary of ResultsThere is a wide disparity in chapter membership, with China
having just 20 members to Germany having over 1200. The main activities are
lectures, workshops, and panel discussions. However, several chapters mentioned
that the largest challenge was to motivate volunteers to organize and
participate in these activities.

Chapters want to build connections within their own
community â€“ they want to be made aware of available speakers and want reduced
prices to research papers and journals. They also want to showcase what they do
in context of other chapters and the broader HCI community. Chapter members want
more lectures and workshops to happen, increased access to the digital library
and at a reduced cost (e.g. free), want conference tutorial notes to be made
available, and want more effective and timely responses from SIGCHI regarding
their information requests (e.g., to update chapter sites, etc). On this latter
point, chapters feel that the communication with ACM is very unidirectional and
that chapter requests never get responded to.

Members were positive about having the visibility and
credibility associated with being connected to ACM and SIGCHI. While this
branding helps them attract members, they want access to more resources.

Unfortunately, chapter members feel disconnected from the
ACM organization, some by indifference, others by lack of knowledge. Chapter
members wanted more information about what their duties are and knowledge about
where and how to access this information. As officers change over time,
knowledge of membership duties is not shared or retained. Chapter members wanted
to know how to update the local chapter pages maintained on the ACM SIGCHI
portal, as much of the current information is sorely out of date. Chapters in
Asia want financial support and greater explanation of benefits. European
chapters were seemingly the loudest voices in wanting more from the ACM .

Ideas for Strengthening RelationsBased on the results presented by Apala, the executive
committee brainstormed on how to strengthen the connection with local chapters.

An immediate idea was that the ACM needs to build awareness
and information access points that are readily available to chapter leadership
and members. ACM should provide chapters with information toolkits (web space
with change permission, mailing lists, information packets, and more), should
touch student organizations to start building leadership among students and
student organizations. Apparently, ACM now has a person whose responsibility is
to track and manage chapters. SIGCHI is seeking to lead in this direction by
providing such information toolkits.

Another idea was that a person who joins ACM SIGCHI should
automatically become a member of the nearest local chapter and be provided with
contact information.

We agreed that the Council of Chapters idea should move
forward at CHI 2005, headed by Apala. The idea is to invite chapter leaders to
CHI 2005, bring them together at the local chapter meetings at the conference,
and discuss the immediate steps that are being taken from the SIGCHI
perspective.

Local chapter leadership should be invited to participate
in SIGCHI conferences. There are lots of different controls that can be
manipulated - tutorials, session chairs, panels, etc. This can also help develop
the experiences necessary to lead future venues at CHI.

Finally, we discussed having a future SIGCHI conference
(CHI, CSCW, UIST) in Asia that would create broader awareness of what HCI is all
about and grow membership there.